No Comfort Zone: Notes on Living with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder by Marla Handy

Author:Marla Handy
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Mocassa Press
Published: 2011-01-30T23:00:00+00:00

There are three pieces to this story I want you to understand. The first has to do with my out-of-body experience. The second has to do with my reaction to my hospital assessment and the third is, well, when I came back.

My dissociation the night I was raped was unnerving to me, even though I couldn’t actually concentrate enough to think about it at the time. What hit me was how familiar it felt. I had gone away countless times before but had forgotten about it. Mostly, I had gone away from my dad.

The times that were easiest to recall were when he tickled me. When I was somewhere between three and six, my dad would jump on me from behind on the living room floor and start “tickling” me. I hated it. I was fighting his ever-moving hands and shrieking, begging him to stop. And then it would suddenly be over and I would be on the floor by myself. When I remembered these times, I always thought that he must have kept it up until I gagged and passed out, then I came to by myself. The night I was raped, I realized that I had gone away all those times, just as I had those two nights he attacked me in the kitchen.

I remembered knowing that I had that ability, though. In high school, when drugs were abundant, I remember thinking that I could go away on my own if I really needed to. I thought of it as “stepping back from my face.”

Sometimes I did an imitation for my siblings of my mom as she was starting to lose it, which I now believe was a form of dissociating.

I would sit quietly in a chair, and say, “Okay, I’m going to do Mom now.” I would stare ahead and go away just a bit, step back from my face just a bit. I would settle back away and my eyes would lose focus.

Once when I did this, one of my siblings got upset and screamed, “Stop it! Stop it! I hate it when you do that!”

To me, the trick made my mom’s disappearances more understandable and was something I could joke about with the sliver of the world that would appreciate it. I realized it wasn’t appreciated and I never did it as entertainment again.

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